Although...

Of course, when he does return from his historic space-trip with the shattering news that planet Earth is not actually flat after all, the rest of the loony brigade will simply claim that the deep-Feds got to him with their brain rays.

A complaint about Comcast to the FCC?

Christ on a chariot-driven crutch

Jesus, there are some dim people frothing away about this today.

Hey, you know what? You can still be as bigoted as you like on Twitter, as long as you aren't advocating violence or affiliated with an organisation that is. Hate Jews, muslims, blacks, whites, asians, women, men, righties, lefties, atheists, or anyone else who isn't you? Go right ahead and tell the world. Just don't write about wanting them attacked.

Also, stop fucking whining about people who are sick of listening to this venomous bullshit deciding to draw a line.

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Re: I Am Not An Aeronautical Engineer

Obviously Airbus have customised their A350 fleet with some sweet liquid cooling. Now they just need to add some clear panels and tasteful LED lighting to the wings to properly show off their pimped rigs.

Re: sought a legal perspective...

The interesting point about "protected free speech" is that the US Constitution only prohibits the US Government from interfering in a US citizen's right to freedom of expression. It has no effect whatsoever on a private business's right to deny someone the use of their platform for the expression of exactly the same material.

24bit. God Damn it.

The SAMPLE RATE, which is a measure of the number of times an analogue wave form is measured per second, i.e frequency. This is your 44.1, 48, 96 KHz number.

The BIT DEPTH. (NOT, repeat NOT 'Bit Rate'.) This is your 16 bit or 24 bit number, and details the amplitude of the analogue waveform at the point where it was sampled. A 16 bit sample has 65,536 possible values (2^16), a 24 bit sample has 16,777,216 (2^24) possible values.

Because Bit Depth is a measure of a wave's amplitude, it can be used as an indicator of a sound's loudness, and this is where using 24 bit makes sense. All audio systems have two boundaries: the lower being the point where a signal becomes indistinguishable from background hiss (the noise floor) and the upper, reached when the signal level becomes so high that the system becomes unable to process it, causing distortion ('clipping', as the peaks and troughs of the waveform are clipped.)

A greater bit depth offers a wider Dynamic Range (more 'headroom') when digitally recording a sound - less background hiss (i.e. a lower noise floor) means that you can record extremely quiet sounds clearly; more numbers (2^24 at 24 bit compared to 2^16 at 16 bit) means you can record much louder sounds without the signal clipping.

In the olden days, even the best studio equipment was noisy, meaning that there was much less headroom available when recording. Studio engineers spent a lot of time managing input levels so that a recording would cleanly capture a performance without the quietest parts being lost in background noise or the loudest parts being clipped. 24 bit recording means that studio engineers don't have to do that any more, as the format offers them enough room to cleanly capture a performance, and if a guitarist decides to turn an amp up to 11, the engineer doesn't particularly have to worry about the signal clipping.

If not more importantly, considering that the vast majority of music made today is created almost entirely through software (including those beloved classic album remasters), the extra headroom that 24 bit offers means that a producer is able to pile on the signal processing effects without being forced to degrade the signal quality of the piece to do so.

24 bit audio is now indispensible in audio production, and people are already moving up to 32 bit floating point workflows.

What about for audio playback? As we know, 24 bit gives us a wider dynamic range - the difference between the quietest sound we can detect and the loudest we can cleanly process. Say you had a 24 bit audio file that consisted of a tone just distinguishable above the noise floor, which then increased to the point where it clips, and that you played this through a pair of capable speakers. By the time the playback finished, you would be in agony, and your hearing would be permanently damaged.

No piece of audio for playback would ever be put out that uses the entire dynamic range 24 bit offers. It would permanently damage customers' audio equipment and their hearing. All a 24 bit file gives you that is missing from a 16 bit recording is masses of dead, empty headroom in which there is nothing to hear, and that will never, ever get used.

Anyone who tells you that listening to a track rendered as a 24 bit file is 'better' than listening to the same audio rendered as 16 bit is a liar or a fool, and either selling you something or trying to justify something expensive they've bought.

Ask people to pay? Excellent!

That's the correct response. No ads and charge a small fee for content. A pound or two for a month's subscription. The most important thing is for the publishers to make that as reasonable, quick, simple and seamless as possible.

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Taste of a Shit Sandwich

Fine, Lucas has the opportunity to tinker with his films. But the question isn't if what he's done is *right*, it's rather whether what he's done is *good*. The answer, with a couple of very minor exceptions, is "absolutely not". Not because of some purist vision holding the originals up as unalloyed masterpieces, because they weren't, but because almost everything he has added has detracted from what's happening on the screen, or was so bad that it was left on the editing room floor in the first place for a reason. Less is often more in cinema, and that's certainly true here.

Re: We got our Osgood answer, though

Every single thing about the Doctor requires you suspend your disbelief. Unless you honestly think there really is a time travelling alien who travels the galaxy in a blue box that's smaller on the outside with a variety of human companions in tow.

Corporate welfare

I believe that phrase refers in part to the recent phenomenon of hugely profitable companies paying many* of their staff so little that those staff are only able to get by through receiving top-up benefits from the state.

* Except for the senior executives. They're paid enough not to need state handouts. They also refuse to contribute to those benefits the state has to pay by "mitigating their tax liabilities". After all, it's only the little people who pay tax.